


The Sky in Winter

by Elsane



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-09
Updated: 2011-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-19 00:40:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsane/pseuds/Elsane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius goes to jail. He does not pass go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sky in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks (years ago now ack) to athenejen for helping me remember how to write.

The door slammed behind him with a crash that rang around the narrow walls of the cell. It was louder than it needed to be, a sound like finality and the brushing of hands. He spun, grabbed the bars and shook them, shouting at Crouch.

"Listen, dammit, no, listen to me! Peter -- you have to find Peter -- he's getting away!"

Crouch stood between the warders in his neat grey robes, trim and dry and immovable. He watched as Sirius raged, and his mouth bent up in a little dead smile.

"This should do," Crouch said to the warder on the left, who nodded. Crouch took the torch from him, and turned to leave.

"Put a trace on Peter Pettigrew!" Sirius shouted after him. Crouch's back was stick-stiff between the warders, vanishing with the torchlight down the corridor.

"He's a rat! Find him!" Sirius yelled finally, desperately, betraying their last secret, and rattled the bars of his door in frustration.

They were rusty, and smelt like blood on his hands.

He shoved at them again, then let go. He didn't know what else to do. For the first time since Peter escaped he was left entirely alone; there was no one left who could go hunt Peter, no one left to listen. Crouch and the guards had vanished, voices, torchlight, footsteps, leaving only the small creeping sounds of the fortress behind: water, dripping, and the rush and fade of waves, the furtive rustle of straw.

 _Too late, too late_. He dropped his head into his hands, and heard again the click of the lock behind him, the horrified flood of voices around him, the slow inexorable rumble as the walls of James and Lily's house fell in. The silence in Peter's flat, growing louder room by empty room, and his own voice coming back to him, unanswered and panicked in the darkness. He pulled his arms in more tightly, shivering;

and then, _no_ , he thought, _no_. Even the North Sea was not this cold. He looked up.

Dementors were drawing in, pale, like moths.

He drew himself straighter, letting his hands fall, and bared his teeth in defiance.

They swarmed up against the bars, and he smelled smoke again, the sick roasting smell that had been his second intimation of disaster. He choked, and stumbled back.

Broken promises.

Broken spectacles.

Empty eyes.

He found himself on his hands and knees. He was shaking. He lifted his head and saw a single hooded figure at his door. Its clawed hands were clasped at its throat, its faceless head bent forward as if it were listening, or smelling, he wasn't sure. He crouched into himself, still shivering, and watched until it turned its head and drifted away.

He swallowed down bile. Kneeling on the stone floor he could hear the heaviness of his own breath, and somewhere in the distance a high thread of sobs, like screams.

It occurred to him for the first time then, as he gripped his own arms in the darkness, that it was still possible for things to get worse.

* * *

  
He had the measure of his cell by heart, four steps by three by detour around the straw. The food was grey, the robes were grey, the walls, the light, the air. If he hauled himself up bodily he could see from his window the crawl of waves upon the sea, sometimes blue and sometimes grey, and nothing more. He wanted to kick something. He wanted to punch the walls until his knuckles bled, anything for some colour, but he had a sneaking fear that bleeding here would be dangerous. He had seen the prisoners who did not scream.

He slid down the wall and sat, shoving his hands into his hair. Peter could be anywhere by now. He thought about that, often, while he ate his grey food and paced around his grey corners. He had imagined a thousand ways Peter could slip out of Britain, a thousand more dark corners in the world where Peter could go to ground. For every scenario he could dream up he designed spells to track Peter, some remembered and some invented, a thousand snares and webs and blades of magic to hunt the rat down.

He had no wand.

He heard the Dementors before he saw them, their breath like bones rattling, dead and dry. He flung his head up and concentrated, defiantly, on a distant morning and the incalculable weight of a newborn in his arms, tiny fists jerking in the great mystery of air. His right hand clenched around the absence of his wand.

The Dementors gathered in a huddle of shadows, and he could feel the memory frosting over, can hear wailing, thin and high, failing to lift the underlying silence.

He jumps off his bike and runs toward the sound, sick with comprehension. He sees James, then, waxen, and can hear nothing past the blood in his ears.

Cold rises around him, the cold of corpses. He chokes on it, and goes under.

* * *

  
He wakes up on the floor. This is how it goes.

  


* * *

  
The Dementors come twice a day to serve despair with a side order of porridge. He stares at the grey lumps in his bowl, and thinks, _Sixty-three_. It is easier to count the meals than eat them.

He puts a spoonful in his mouth. It's awful, ashen and tasteless, like failure turned to food.

His mental Remus raises an eyebrow, because Remus never let him get away with this sort of thing. _Gooey failure, then. I always told you porridge was vile stuff. Have you tried adding raisins?_

 _Merlin, no, if porridge tastes like Dementor, what would raisins taste like?_

 _Raisins of Rue_ , Remus says, and snickers. _I think I've been to curry houses that use those._

 _How about Currant Events,_ he says, a little sourly; _Merlin knows those are horrid enough._

 _Ha. We should sell these to Bott. People will get sick of Every-flavor Beans any day now, he can start a line in dried fruit._

 _Oh, come on -- squid-flavored jelly beans are one thing, but who the hell would buy Sultanas of Sorrow?_

Remus's smile is wicked. _No? Just imagine the fruitcake you could send to your mother._

He laughs, and even to his own ears it sounds unhinged.

He puts the bowl down, a small click against the floor, and leans his head back against the wall. He swallows; his throat is tight.

Outside the moon is waxing. He sees the silver shifting on the sea and knows that this, too, is a failure.

* * *

 _James_ , he thinks when the cold rises.

It is dreadfully easy to remember James. It is harder now to remember James as he was in their sunlit days, sprawled out on the grass, his robes and hair in easy disarray, shoving his glasses up with an impatient finger; or the nights, windswift in the forest, stag and dog together exulting in the sheer purity of speed, the surety of breath and muscle.

And the rat with them, riding in the antlers.

No.

 _James, on the grass_. Propped up on his elbows. James is serious, which is a rare thing and strange, and his eyes are steady.

 _You know you have a home with me,_ James says. _Whenever you need it._

James' fierceness is between himself and the Dementors at his door. It doesn't hold them, not even for a moment. He doesn't need the Dementors to remind him that James' home is ash and rubble, that James' eyes stare blankly to the sky, unseeing. He can already see the broken spectacles, crooked on a face made strange by stillness.

 _How could you, Sirius?_

* * *

  
He lies drifting in the straw. A Dementor places his breakfast on the floor, its fingers scabbed and spiderlike around the bowl. He doesn't think it has feet.

 _They made you from fog and grave dirt,_ he says. He doesn't know how he knows this.

He's not sure if it's magic or madness. He closes his eyes.

  


* * *

He has been under siege before. He knows it's a mode of warfare he cannot sustain.

 _I don't do so well without you, do I,_ he hears himself say, sixteen and shaken. He had thought he had been talking about tactics.

Moony looks at him, inscrutable in the treehouse, then, in a quick stutter backwards, bloodless and bruised in the hospital bed as the memory runs to poison. Betrayal sits heavily on his tongue.

 _No_ , he says, choking, but the Dementors are at his door now, avid.

Again. Moony is older and still bruised. They are in a café, cheap tea and suspicion on the dirty tablecloth between them. He has just said something he will want to burn out of his brain, later, and Remus looks away.

But it is Peter who stands against him, his face alight with calculation and cruelty, his own finger clutched in his hand like a wand.

 _James and Lily, how could you?_

The smell of rotten eggs. Himself, laughing.

 _How could you, Sirius?_

He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He can still hear his own voice, laughing, in despair.

  


* * *

  
Later. He opens his eyes and knows: I am a dog. I am Sirius Black. This was not my betrayal.

The Dementors waver at his door, and he growls.

* * *

  
He wakes curled tightly into himself, shivering. It is bitter cold, but a chill in his bones rather than in his soul. Moonlight shows the cracks in the floor and the bones in his ankles.

 _January_ , he thinks. He has to calculate the month, which scares him, because he knows he will sooner or later lose track. He stands stiffly and paces against the cold.

Despite the waxing moon the stars are brilliant. He can just see Orion out the corner of the window, celestial club raised perpetually to threaten and never to fall.

There are no Dementors.

He feels, for a moment, like his namesake:, clear and cold. There is no James, now, to help him invent magic, no Remus to help with the strategy, although Peter still provides an awful parody of moral support. He stands between stone and starlight alone with his innocence, and if this is a bitter thing and hollow it is still true. It is not happiness that will help him against the Dementors now.

He cannot have long before the Dementors return. He has no wand, no cauldron, not even any charcoal to scratch runes into the floor. What he does have is still more than his jailors know: Padfoot first of all, but beyond that, an inborn affinity for Transfiguration, for raw and wordless magic, and beyond everything his own innocence like a brand.

In this moment of chill clarity he understands what he needs to do.

Everything in him that is soft, everything that is vulnerable, he buries within Padfoot, out of reach, beneath the hard knowledge of innocence, injustice, incompletion. It is an obscene kind of purification, and afterward he crouches on the cold floor, changed and shaken.

He hopes like hell he can undo this later.

  


* * *

He watches the moonlight crawl across the stones again, and again, and again, and knows time passes.


End file.
